Tutorials - Shirt
We are now ready to dive right in to dolling. The first element we will make is a shirt.
Here are the palettes I will be using for this tutorial:
Start by outlining the sides of the top. You can use the outline of the base as a guide. Once the sides are drawn, draw the bottom of the shirt.
What not to do:
Do not draw a straight line for the bottom seam. Bodies are not made out of paper—they have curves. So make the bottom of your shirt curve down.
Now draw the neckline and sleeves. If want to you can use the curve tool (in MSPaint) or pen tool (in Photoshop and PaintShopPro)to help you draw smoother curves for the neckline. Here I've made three variations to show a few designs you can do.
Flood-fill the outline with the fourth color in your palette. You can see I've also altered the bottom of the outline a bit because there will be creases in that area.
Take the second darkest color and start to draw shadows around the sides of the shirt, and under the breasts. Notice that I've erased the two underbreast outlines. Start to draw in the little creases at the bottom.
What not to do:
Do not shade around every outline. The top and bottom edge of clothing are flat and do not cast shadows. The crease between the breast shouldn't be shaded either, or else it will look like the shirt is painted on.
Take the third color and add more shading around where you shaded in the last step. This will make the shading smoother. Extend the creases at the bottom of the shirt.
Highlights are drawn in with the lightest colors, and are placed in the middle of any big area that is still filled with the initial fill colour. It can be kind of hard to figure out where exactly to put them at first, so make sure to zoom out every so often to see if it looks good. (If you're using MSPaint, try going into View > Zoom > Show Thumbnail)
I thought this shirt was a little plain, so I decided to add a little design to it (That's what the second palette is for). Note how the shading on the design matches that on the actual shirt: this is the key to making the design look like it's actually on the shirt.
Final Result:
Here's the final pixel doll. The rest of the tutorials in the "For Newbies" series will show how to do the rest of her clothing and hair.